Imagine it's 5 a.m., and you hear faint rustling noises coming from your downstairs bathroom. You come down to inspect what's going on, and when you open the creaking door to the dimly lit lavatory, you see holes in your wall getting progressively bigger.
Something is trying to claw its way into your apartment.
Suddenly, part of a man's hand comes into view. A stranger's dusty, wiggling finger pokes through your apartment wall in the early morning hours as he tries to rip a hole into your bathroom.
He's frantic. He's irrational. He's knee-deep in some desperately dark shit — possibly involving tainted nose candy and some kinky roleplay — and it's about to breach that barrier and spill into your world.
Unfortunately for occupants at an apartment in the Miro Brickell building, this was no bad dream. It's what went down on May 3 as a man from a neighboring unit tried to rip into their downstairs powder room.
A video posted on the popular social media page Only in Dade captured part of the incident and gave viewers a taste of the Kafka-esque encounter. Initially, the caption indicated that there was a kidnapping.
"Witness states eight people were kidnapped in Brickell," the caption read. "Video shows them trying to escape and asking for help through a connecting wall of the apartment next door."
Thousands of Instagram comments poured in from users, many of whom warned of rampant human trafficking here in Miami. One user stated that "Miami is the human trafficking capital of the world," while another stated, "Imagine thinking [you] have a rat in your laundry room only to discover a whole human trafficking operation right next door."
But as it turns out, no one was kidnapped or trying to escape their captor, according to a police report obtained by New Times. (The Only in Dade description was updated to reflect as much.)
The story is infinitely weirder.
Around 5:30 a.m. on May 3, officers from the Miami Police Department arrived at the Miro building after a tenant reported the man trying to rip into her bathroom wall. She told police an unknown person was tearing through and asking for help, according to the report.
When police went next door to get to the bottom of the madness, they were told by the group inside that it was a rented Airbnb.
Upon being interviewed, the man who had been clawing at the wall "stated that he was a frequent user of cocaine and must've taken a bad rock that gave him hallucinations and caused him to be paranoid."
"He stated he locked himself inside the downstairs bathroom with the light off, which caused him to panic, and he began to break through the wall in an attempt to get out of the bathroom," the police report states.
He told police that after the harrowing encounter, he asked to be locked in a separate bathroom upstairs because he was having a "bad trip." That's where police initially encountered him: he was confined inside, with a blanket wrapped around a bathroom door handle and tied at the other end to an outside closet.
A second man inside the apartment told police that the coked-up gentleman enjoys being locked up "due to a sexual roleplay scenario that he likes to engage in," the report states. The witness cited roleplay as the reason the man was willing to be confined again in the upstairs bathroom after the experience downstairs, according to the report.
New Times reached out to the contacts listed in the police report. One individual declined to comment, while others did not pick up the phone or denied being present during the episode.
Three women inside the apartment when the police came knocking told police they were unaware of other people inside the apartment. They claimed their friend, who was not present, had rented the Airbnb and given them the entry code.
The Miami police booted everyone from the unit and documented the property damage for the shaken neighbor, but no arrests were logged.
After Miami Fire Rescue treated the bad-trip wall ripper on scene, he refused to be transported to a medical facility.
